The present invention relates to a vehicle body such as an automobile body, and more specifically to a rear parcel shelf of a vehicle body.
One conventional construction of a rear end of a passenger compartment of a vehicle body is shown in Nissan Service Weekly No. 429, p175. In this example, as shown in FIG. 9, a rear waist panel which extends in a lateral direction of the vehicle body and supports a bottom edge of a rear window glass, a rear parcel shelf panel and a reinforcing panel are joined together to form a box beam whose inner space is in fluid communication with the outside of the vehicle body through one or more ducts. That is, the box beam is formed by three panels. Therefore, this construction is disadvantageous in that the number of component parts and the number of joints requiring spot welding are increased, and that the shape of the box beam is restricted by the shapes of the three panels, so that the sectional area of the box beam cannot be increased sufficiently without decreasing the rigidity of the box beam.